A Calculated Risk, Katherine Neville [english novels for students txt] 📗

showing that bankers derived an aura of power from wearing gray flannel suits. I preferred to dress as if I owned the bank, and had only dropped in to see how my dividends were doing.

I arrived at the office that morning wearing enough yards of midnight-blue silk to upholster a sofa. The garment looked like a simple tunic, but I’d been assured that the best minds of Milan had labored to exhaustion over it. So much for the dress code.

My staff didn’t take such things seriously, either. As I stepped onto the thirteenth floor they were flying about in jeans and sneakers, wearing T-shirts that said things like “Good Thruput” and “Cold-Started.”

I thought of the thirteenth floor as the trading floor. It was a rats’ maze of modular units supposedly designed to induce an “atmosphere of problem sharing”—all done in “tranquilizing” blue … against a backdrop of “exhilarating” electric-orange carpeting. As far as I could tell, the combination produced schizophrenia—but then, computer types aren’t all that normal, anyway.

I had learned the way through the maze to my office, and I went in and closed the door until my secretary, Pavel, could bring me a cup of coffee. Pavel was tall, dark, and handsome, with the manners of a diplomatic aide. He might have been a movie star, and was, in fact, studying by night to be an actor. He claimed that his job at the bank gave him exposure to life in its most primitive emotional state.

Everyone I worked with knew about the “two-cup rule”: that I could not be communicated with until after two cups of coffee, or ten o’clock in the morning—whichever came first. Until then, I could receive, but could not transmit.

Pavel tiptoed in with the coffee and closed the door softly behind him. He placed the cup before me on the desk.

“Lukewarm, just the way you like it,” he promised me. “You have three meetings today. I put them on your calendar. And do you still want the small conference room reserved for four o’clock? You can just nod if it’s okay.”

“Cancel the meetings,” I told him as he looked at me with wide eyes. “I’ve already had enough coffee this morning to float a kidney. Kiwi canceled my proposal last night.” Since no one knew about my job at the Fed, I thought it prudent not to mention that part.

“I figured as much,” Pavel said in a breathless whisper, pushing back the rolled-up sleeves of his silk sweater. “I saw the shredded version in your trash basket this morning when I came in.” He took a seat opposite me. He looked so worried, leaning forward with his chin cupped in his hands, that I smiled. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

“A new proposal,” I said. “Bring me the red-tape file; I want every boring rule book at the bank.”

Pavel grinned widely, and headed for the door, pausing only to raise his fist aloft.

“Power to the plebeians,” he said. “Hoist them with their own horseshit.”

Knowing the rules—in banking as in cricket—was the name of the game. Playing by the rules was something else again.

Some people say that rules are made to be broken, but I’ve never thought so. Rules are like flagpoles in a slalom race: you observe their presence religiously, skirt around them as closely as possible, and never let them cut your speed.

The Bank of the World was a very big bank—perhaps, as its name suggested, the biggest bank in the world. Because of its size, the bank had plenty of rules—so many that no one had time to read them all, much less to follow them.

There were whole departments whose sole function was to churn out new rules, and often they quarreled with each other over whose rules were the “official” ones. My desk was buried each week under new standards and procedures from groups I’d never heard of. The documents were duly filed by Pavel in the red-tape file, and promptly forgotten. I knew I’d find, amid all those reams of bureaucratic bullshit, something suitable to my purpose. After all, if there were so many conflicting rules governing the managing of money, there must be one that would enable me to steal some and prove Kiwi to be the irresponsible fool I knew he was.

It took the better half of the day before I found it: a packet of brand-new procedures from Wholesale Information Planning Systems, or “WHIPS,” as they liked to call themselves. I knew the WHIPS group well; they were the most prolific policy setters at the bank. They’d set a record for producing useless paper. In this case, however, I felt sure there’d be an excellent use for their freshly hatched policy. It took a bit of imagination, but fantasy was always my strong suit. The first words that caught my eye were: “This methodology was used with great success at United Trust, to test their security systems.”

How convenient.

It was a method known as Theory Z. I already knew plenty about it; it made me want to vomit. It was an import from Japan, and when it had first been touted in the business journals as the latest management vogue, I’d thought it was the most ruthless attack by the Japanese since Pearl Harbor. But now that I was a theoretical thief, Theory Z took on a whole new color. The color was rose.

The general idea was that managers were wholly unnecessary; everything in Japan, we were told, was carried out by little faceless teams called quality circles. They did everything required to make a product—designed it, built it, tested it—and all decisions were made by mutual consent: management by committee. The banking community loved it, they embraced it, they practically enshrined it. But they weren’t really sure exactly what to do with it.

I thought I could tell them.

I buzzed Pavel and asked him to get United Trust on the phone, pronto, and connect me with their head of security systems. He’d only have to say,